"So far it is as was expected, there is hardly any real damage," Ben Yisrael said.

"Anonymous doesn't have the skills to damage the country's vital infrastructure," he said.

"And if that was its intention, then it wouldn't have announced the attack ahead of time.

"It wants to create noise in the media about issues that are close to its heart," he said.

In January last year, a hacker network that claimed to be based in Saudi Arabia paralyzed the websites of Israel's stock exchange and national airline and claimed to have published details of thousands of Israeli credit cards.

A concerted effort to cripple Israeli websites during November fighting in Gaza failed to cause serious disruption.

Israel said at the time that protesters barraged Israel with more than 60 million hacking attempts.

An official of the militant Hamas movement that rules the Gaza Strip praised the current attack. "God bless the minds and the efforts of the soldiers of the electronic battle," Ihab Al- Ghussian, Gaza's chief government spokesman, wrote on his official Facebook page.